swine flu in numbers

Chairman and professor of the department of microbiology at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York, Peter Palese, discusses the influenza viruses and the disease which is caused by these viruses.

The virus is very, very small. A cell which is infected by this virus is probably as large as the Empire State Building. So this is a very small virus which can within 8 hours, infect us all and kill this Empire State Building and make about a hundred thousand new virus particles. This is scarry.

The Centers for Disease Control calculate that the number of deaths over the next two years could range from 90,000 to several hundred thousand, the World Health Organization believes H1N1 is still in the “early stages” of a new pandemic. They estimate that 2 billion people (one-third of the world’s population) could be infected over the next two years.

According to Wikipedia worldwide confirmed deaths from swine flu is 5,850 + latest 7 days record 1,046 (18%)†‡. The H1N1 family member spanish flu killed anywhere from 20 to 100 million people in 1915.

Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey says for the emergence of the influenza virus in general there is a swine lineage, and there is a bird lineage. And these are the major players in the emergence of human influenza.Most of the genes of this new variant come from pigs.

It is the combination of the genes that makes the swine flu so powerful. I believe, the most powerful weapon we have against swine flu is the gene sequencing technology. We should be able to sequence, characterize the novel strains and design vaccines against, ahead of time.

What was the most recent price for gene sequencing per base pair ? Any one following that ?

İnfro from the following sites are combined for this article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...
http://momento24.com/en/2009/0...